Britain in the 20Th Century: the Attempt to Construct a Socialist Commonwealth, 1945-1951 Transcript
Britain in the 20th Century: The Attempt to Construct a Socialist Commonwealth, 1945-1951 Transcript Date: Tuesday, 15 November 2011 - 6:00PM Location: Museum of London 15 November 2011 Britain in The 20th Century: The Attempt to Construct a Socialist Common Wealth, 1945 - 1951 Professor Vernon Bogdanor This lecture considers the post-war settlement put forward by the Attlee Government, which I began talking about in my last lecture. I discussed, in particular, the Welfare State, which was instituted by the Attlee Government, completing reforms of earlier governments: the Liberals, before the First World War, and then the wartime Coalition. I now want to discuss the other elements of the settlement. The second element was a belief in planning, which was a great contrast to the end of the First World War, when planning and nationalisation had rapidly been succeeded by de-control. The Labour Party, in its 1945 Manifesto, called “Let us Face the Future”, said that it would plan “from the ground up”. Herbert Morrison, Leader of the House of Commons, said in 1946 that, “planning, as it is now taking shape in this country under our eyes, is something new and constructively revolutionary, which will be regarded in times to come as a contribution to civilisation as vital and distinctively British as parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.” But what did planning mean? During the War, of course, goods had been allocated by a policy of rationing, which is what some members of the Labour Party believed in by “planning”. One economic advisor wrote in his diary: “I fear that Cripps [Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade and then Chancellor in the Labour Government] wants a detailed economic plan in the sense of a statement of exactly how many shirts, how many pairs of boots and shoes, etc., we should produce over each of the next five years.
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